... the same time as Gary Murray's Enemies of the State, a book much edited by solicitors, one imagines. Murray, enigmatic at the best of times, is nevertheless a valuable commentator on the Hilda Murrell killing. Dorril deals with the case, with sensibleness oozing from every serif, in his chapter 'Mysterious Deaths, Deniable Operations and Private Spooks', which begins: 'Do the security services carry out assassinations? The simple answer is, we do not know.' Such an answer-- indeed such a question-- reminds me of Patrick Moore on The Sky at Night. 'Do assassinations occur on the dark side of the moon?' The simple answer is, ...

... , including short sections on some UK firms; a chapter on Alexander Haig's post-government career in this field; and a chapter on the revolving door between the Pentagon and the arms corporations. The private sector has become increasingly involved in the use of military force abroad (a) because of greater deniability- the same motive which produced 'private' spooks in the intelligence field,- and (b) because of the political sensitivity of American casualties abroad. If someone is going to come home in a body bag, better it be a mercenary than a citizen. The cynicism of the American arms companies is breathtaking. Having lost the Soviet 'threat' they simply commissioned the invention a ...

... . If you look up the Security Service, Secret Intelligence Services, GCHQ, in the Index...you guessed it: all their references are '666'. The book is 550 pages long and it has 1491 column references. How many hours did it take some wonderful civil servant wag to work out how to get all our spooks categorised under the sign of the Devil? When the civil service makes internal jokes, they can seldom be bettered. NATO and Eastern Europe Who wrote the following? 'Nato is now a device to exert control and extract cash. Those who resist, like Belarus, are punished... All eastern European states are required to sell ...

... and wider left seemed politically relevant. My interest in MI5 was in MI5 qua enemy of the left. But as the wider left disintegrated in the UK after the fall of the Soviet bloc, and the British secret state more or less gave up surveilling, penetrating and manipulating it, the political point of trying to find out what the spooks were doing diminished. In 1986 when Lobster 11 appeared, detailing some of the anti-Labour activities of the 1970s, many of the people involved were still alive, as were the consequences of those operations. Now such research is just history. It's still interesting but not as interesting. Secondly, the shift to economic politics isn't in fact ...

... ) That said, my belief that Jones was a government informant is probably not the reason that Dr. Moore corrals me in the conspiracists' ghetto. After all, only a professional idiot would fail to question Jones's bona fides. Even if we overlook his 201 file at the CIA and his strange association with Dan Mitrione (a notorious spook), it is a matter of fact that his life-work culminated in the violent deaths of more than 900 men, women and children of the Left. (4) That this catastrophe took place in what might be called 'the age of Cointelpro' seems to me a circumstance sufficiently out of the ordinary as to merit unusual scrutiny and ...

... the SIRC's propensity to whitewash CSIS. CSIS and its terror tactics Years ago a former CSIS officer, W. J. Baltruweit, wrote, 'CSIS management willingly and deliberately coerced by intimidation (hence "terrorize"), and gained submission by inducing fear (hence "terrorism") .'3 Mr. Baltruweit is not the only former Canadian spook to refer to CSIS's well-known illegal use of 'counter intelligence tactics used for surveillance, intimidation and harassment'. In an article in Lobster 61, 'CSIS and the Canadian Stasi',4 Gareth Llewellyn, another former senior Canadian intelligence officer, describes his own persecution by CSIS. Indeed Wikileaks unearthed a US diplomatic cable which stated that the ...

... be kept within Whitehall but is now conducted in part in the media.(2) Like a barium enema, a whistle-blower like Shayler illuminates the nether regions. The fact that the Intelligence and Security Committee of the House of Commons has never taken written or oral statements from Shayler or Richard Tomlinson, the most important insider sources on our spooks in the post-war period, shows precisely how little independence the committee actually has. (3) As it was in the hardback, Shayler's critique of MI5 submitted to a Cabinet Office review is one of the appendices. His complaint is that MI5 was was old-fashioned and out of touch. Reading this again I am still no clearer as ...

... .does suggest.... appears' is about as vague as you can do it and still appear to be saying something. (Were news organisations using video in 1968?) There is no documentation, just a short list of the 'most interesting' books consulted, in which Jim Hougan has become Jim Houghton and his book Spooks has become The Haunting of America, the subtitle of the American edition. Even if the content of the book was accurate, there is a bigger problem with the authorial voice. The author wants us to accept that some conspiracies are real but isn't always willing to decide which ones. The section 'Colin Wallace conspiracy' contains a major ...

... But how did they get the bomb on the plane? Then some of the clothes in the bomb debris were identified as having been purchased in Malta and since the two Libyans were there at the right time, and a flight from Malta fed into the flight out of London – voilà! Case solved! She doesn't see direction by the spooks: she sees an investigation derailing itself. The Germans couldn't find a link between the plane and the PFLP – How did they get the bomb on the plane? – and the British were reluctant to to investigate Heathrow, 1 This book arrived the day that Exaro published material showing (again) that the US intelligence people didn't believe ...